One thing I will never forgive this administration for is making me feel bad for horrible people like Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer, and so on. Yet all these people simply aren't as horrible as the president*.

My hypothesis is an extensive blackmail network, and I'm not kidding. Someone, probably someone Russian, has such vile and/or repulsive shit on most of these people that they have to go along with whatever is thrown at them.

What does he think he is? A monarch? This nation is supposed to be a republic, not a monarchy.

I'm a subject of the Crown of Britain, and in my lifetime, I haven't seen anything like that from the Royal family, a few shitty remarks from Prince Philip aside. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ In fact, in family lore it's just my great grandfather, an American, who was an engineer for Canadian Pacific Rail, once had in his engine one of those random kings from the early 1900s when they were changing them like so much underwear. The complaint was that the monarch didn't offer him one of his expensive cigarettes.

Now where have I heard the loyalty demands? I have connections to Venezuela, and holy shit. The airport full of banners of Chavez (When he was alive, I haven't been back since.) hugging children and smiling for the camera. This was back when there was still stock in supermarkets. Good luck getting milk, though.

So, with that in mind:

Evita Peron:
"Answer violence with violence. If one of us falls today, five of them must fall tomorrow."
"One cannot accomplish anything without fanaticism."
"Where there is worker, there lies a nation"

Augusto Pinochet:
"I'm looking at them from above, because God put me here."
"Not a single leaf moves in this country if I'm not the one moving it. I want that to be clear!"

Idi Amin:
"Sometimes people mistake the way I talk for what I am thinking."

Mao Zedong:
"To read too many books is harmful."

Mobutu Sese Seko:
"The chief is the chief. He is the eagle who flies high and cannot be touched by the spit of the toad."

Robert Mugabe:
"It may be necessary to use methods other than constitutional ones."

Saddam Hussein:
"Politics is when you say you are going to do one thing while intending to another. Then you do neither." (lol, this guy got it.)

Silvio Berlusconi:
"I am the Jesus Christ of politics. I am a patient victim, I sacrifice myself for everyone."

Todor Zhivkov:
"This year - a factory of semiconductors. Next year - a factory of whole conductors!"
"We must make a radical turn, at 360 degrees."

He added: “It certainly risks people starting to refer to us as a kleptocracy. That’s a term people throw around fairly freely when they’re talking about Russia, fairly or unfairly, and we run the risk of getting branded the same way. America really should stand for more than that.”

How will DT get anything done? Does he expect to do everything by executive order? Or else by making deals with politicians individually? He'll have to start reaching out to Democrats in addition to Republicans if he will have any chance to get anything done.

Or am I doing more thinking that he is capable of? Would he say if he considered this issue "Ivanka! Ivanka! Help me! Help me!"?

the President’s re-election committee is already hard at work, while his daughter Ivanka Trump is duly apprenticed in the White House that, according to my sources, she means to occupy as America’s first female President

So it's Donald Trump again in 2020, then Ivanka Trump in 2024 and 2028.

After noting Hillary Clinton's defeat of Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries,

Quote:

As it was, of course, the victory of the Democratic establishment merely ensured the victory of the only Sanders counterpart on the Republican side with whom Sanders differed sharply on almost everything – except for the only thing that really mattered to both: the urgent need to mobilize government policies to increase American jobs and wages, in firm opposition to all the competing international and planetary priorities continuously proffered by elite Americans and their core institutions, along with Pope Francis and other leading figures.

He then discusses a rather curious issue: affordability of cars.

Quote:

That is why the car affordability numbers revealed in June 2016 were so vastly significant in determining the outcome of the elections. Going by metropolitan areas, they extracted maximum affordable car prices from median incomes. The latter ranged from the stellar $87,210 of San Jose in the opulence of California’s Silicon Valley, all the way down to the $24,701 of deindustrialized Cleveland, Ohio, numbers that in turn yielded maximum affordable price limits of $32,855 in San Jose, and $7,558 in Cleveland – not actually the lowest number, which was Detroit’s $6,174, owing to high average insurance costs in that crime-afflicted city (at $1,131.40 per annum, as compared to Cleveland’s $659.47).

What made these seemingly obscure numbers nothing less than momentous was that the cheapest new car on sale in the United States in 2016 was the Nissan Versa sedan at $12,825, twice the level that average households could afford in Detroit or Cleveland, and more than average households could afford in cities ranging from Philadelphia, Orlando, Milwaukee, Memphis, Providence, New Orleans, Miami and Buffalo, as well as, a fortiori, in a very great number of smaller localities across the United States, even in high-income states such as California and Oregon, as well much more commonly in the lower-income Southern and rust-belt states.

Since Americans are so car-dependent, this means trouble.

He mentions two issues: wage stagnation and what he considers overregulation of car design: safety and fuel efficiency.

Quote:

And both those purposes are much more costly to achieve than they could have been because they are subverted by the safety norms that prohibit the much lighter vehicles I happily drive in Japan, whose K-cars merrily drive up steep mountain roads in spite of their minuscule engines, and that also prohibit the several small cars sold in Europe for much less than the $12,825 of the cheapest US car.

Then there is a part where he seems to deny that natural gas is now underselling coal and where he seems to think that global warming is a non-issue. He also seems to think that former President Obama was trying to regulate coal to death.

Nothing on developing alternatives to coal, and eventually alternatives to natural gas -- he claims that wind and solar aren't cheap enough to compete with them.

Quote:

What happens next depends on the fate of that other vector of the Trump strategy – his $1.3 trillion infrastructure plan which a White House team is striving to convert into an actual programme that specifies what is to be built where, and with what sort of funding, whether public or private.

That's way too optimistic. His infrastructure plans continue to be very vague, especially the funding of them. Tax breaks for Wall Streeters, apparently.

Quote:

If the resulting employment generation kicks in fully by 2020, Trump will coast to re-election, especially if by then he can claim that the Mexican border is “sealed”, which will then result in his ordering the automatic legalization of all tax-paying and non-felonious illegal immigrants, giving him a chunk of the Hispanic vote as well, after decades of unfulfilled promises, including Obama’s.

That strikes me as also very optimistic. He might get some Hispanic votes, but his base would be outraged.

the President’s re-election committee is already hard at work, while his daughter Ivanka Trump is duly apprenticed in the White House that, according to my sources, she means to occupy as America’s first female President

So it's Donald Trump again in 2020, then Ivanka Trump in 2024 and 2028.